Mario Vargas Llosa
What is Art? First of
all, Art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy,
feelings and moods; Art is not the expression of merely the subjective
sensations and experiences of the poet; Art is not assigned the goal of
primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, Art cognises
life. Both Art and science have the same subject: life reality. But science
analyses, Art synthesises; science is abstract, Art is concrete; science turns
to the mind of man, Art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the
help of concepts, Art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual
contemplation.
A.Voronsky-Art is the
Cognition of Life
“Truth is found neither
in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles
the two.”
― Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel
“The owl of Minerva
begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”
― Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Whether or not you agree
with Noble laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s political
outlook, his novel Harsh Times about the Coup in 1950s Guatemala is a cracking
read. According to Edward Docx, “It speaks
to our times”. However, the general reader would do well to delve into the
history books of this period, especially Guatemala's history, to fully
appreciate the novel's power.
As Docx correctly
states, “In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be:
unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash
of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope;
artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and
all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken
from all points on the compass of the human character.”
Vargas Llosa stays very
close to some facts, but not all of them. However, he manages to weave a path
to the lives of real and fictional characters. Vargas is not a stranger to writing
novels that include historical events in Latin America. His tendency to reduce
the ideological battles of the Cold War to little more than a minor deviation of
“a democratic ideal” is a dangerous simplification of complex historical
processes and tends to downplay the role of U.S. imperialism in the tragic
events in Guatemala. Perhaps more damaging is Vargas’s insistence that the novelist
has no obligation to represent historical facts.
As Ivan Kenneally writes,
“ In a lecture he delivered on his own, The Real Life of Alexandro Mayta,
Vargas Llosa maintained that the novelist bears no responsibility to represent
historical facts at all faithfully. The events as they truly transpired—to the
extent that this can be objectively determined—furnish only the “raw materials”
for the construction of a novel, the initial “point of departure,” a contention
he emphatically espouses discussing another of his works, The War of the End
of the World. The singular obligation of the novelist is to be persuasive,
to imaginatively materialise a world that does not reproduce but rather negates
the one normally inhabited by the reader, a substitution of such force it can
induce joy, despair, and revelation. This “sleight of hand replacement of the
concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral
world of fiction” is the fulcrum of the novelistic enterprise. Its
believability has nothing to do with a humble obeisance to fact. Still, it is a
function of the “ponderous and complicated machinery that enables a fiction to
create the illusion that it is true, to pretend to be alive”.
Llosa’s playing fast and
loose with historical truth is dangerous and has political and historical
consequences. His viewpoint is opposed by Kenneally who writes again “If the
authoritative power of literature is disconnected from its relation to reality,
then why write a historical novel at all? Why should the novelist not manumit
himself from the “raw material” supplied by documented history? If the point is
to enact the “illusion of autonomy,” the “impression of self-sufficiency, of
being freed from real life,” why choose a genre that insistently invokes the
irrepressibility of extra-literary existence?[1]
Like many of his
generation Llosa began his early career somewhat sympathetic to the
revolutionary left’s ideals. The glorification of revolutions such as the Cuban
was not confined to a generation of Latin American intellectuals such as Llosa.
Several petty-bourgeois radical groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party (U.K.)
complemented them. Bert Deck writing in the International Socialist Review said
“The Cuban revolution has shattered the
old structure of radical politics in Latin America by providing a new example
to follow. New currents and tendencies are emerging. Two roads present
themselves to the Latin American revolutionists: “The Guatemalan Way” or “The
Cuban Way.” Fidelismo, a more revolutionary alternative to the Communist
parties, already exists. The possibility of avoiding the trap of popular front politics
has been improved immeasurably. In this new, open situation, the Marxists have
an unprecedented opportunity to win support for a consistent revolutionary
program. In the complex process of political realignment within the workers
movement lies the hope of avoiding future Guatemalas – the hope for a Socialist
United States of Latin America.”[2]
The British Trotskyists
from the Socialist Labour League opposed this political line saying “Even if
Castro and his cadre were “converted” would that make the revolution a
proletarian revolution? … If the Bolsheviks could not lead the revolution
without a conscious working class support, can Castro do this? Quite apart from
this, we have to evaluate political tendencies on a class basis, on the way
they develop in struggle in relation to the movement of classes over long
periods. A proletarian party, let alone a proletarian revolution, will not be
born in any backward country by the conversion of petit-bourgeois nationalists
who stumble “naturally” or “accidentally” upon the importance of the workers
and peasants. The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and
Britain recognise full well that only by handing over political “independence”
to leaders of this kind, or accepting their victory over feudal elements like
Farouk and Nuries-Said, can the stakes of international capital and the
strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[3]
Over time, politically, Llosa
began shifting further to the right. During the 1980s, he became a champion of
free markets and political liberalism, standing as a centre-right presidential
candidate in the Peruvian presidential election in 1990. More recently, his
rightward drift has become more open. In 2014, he joined the Mont Pelerin
Society, the organisation founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 that has become
famous for neoliberalism.[4]
Llosa’s sharp shift to
the right coloured his analysis of the early Cold War period. He lamented that
the C.I.A.-sponsored Coup against Arbenz had caused too many young people in
Latin America to turn towards communism and that the United States had crushed “the
liberal democratic aspirations” of the people.
His book faithfully
reconstructs the events in Guatemala that began with the 1944 October
Revolution and ended with the Coup in 1954. The election of Jacob Arbenz. Welcomed
by many left-leaning media outlets who hoped that the election of the liberal
Arbenz would bring about a new “democratic spring,” Arbenz’s election was met with
uncontrollable rage by American Imperialism.
Even the so-called
“democratic spring” under J.J. Arévalo and his successor Jacobo Arbenz, who,
unlike Bernardo, came to power based upon a program of democratic, agricultural
and social reforms, proved most fundamentally that there is no peaceful or
reformist road for the masses in Guatemala and other semi-colonial countries to
secure their democratic and social rights.
In 1954, the United
States carried out a coup d’état to remove Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz
from power, cancelling land reforms. The elected government of Arbenz by introducing a limited agrarian reform that
infringed upon the vast holdings of the politically influential United Fruit
Company drew the wrath of U.S. Imperialism.
Dwight Eisenhower would
later acknowledge, “We had to get rid of a Communist Government which had taken
over.” Llosa, the book stops at the 1954 coup. The Coup led to decades of
dictatorships, The subsequent Guatemalan elites murdered over 200,000
Guatemalans, most of whom came from the indigenous Mayans.
Eduardo Galeano
characterised the decades of dictatorship that followed in his book Open
Veins of Latin America: “The World Turned its Back while Guatemala
underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the
village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their
intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in
Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A
rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s
plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the
cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were
machine-gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”
As Hegel said, “An idea
is always a generalisation, and generalisation is a property of thinking. To
generalise means to think”. Whatever its faults and many, Llosa’s new book
certainly makes you think, and it does “ speak to our times”. It is perhaps an
irony of history when the latest election occurred in Guatemala this year.
Bernardo
Arévalo, a candidate promoted by the pseudo-left and U.S. imperialism, won the
election. Juan José Averalo's son Arevalo was president after the 1944 October Revolution.
There
is absolutely no basis for describing Arévalo as a left, democratic or
progressive alternative to the clientelism of Guatemala’s ruling elite, whose
subordination to foreign capital and U.S. imperialism is the main cause of the
rampant poverty, inequality, authoritarianism and corruption that characterise
Guatemalan social life.
[1]Mario Vargas Llosa: Harsh Times
and the “Fantastical Repudiation of Reality”
March
10, 2022 Ivan Kenneally-https://openlettersreview.com/posts/mario-vargas-llosa-harsh-times-and-the-fantastical-repudiation-of-reality
[2] Guatemala 1954 – The Lesson Cuba
Learned: International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, pp.53-56.
[3] Letter of the NEC of the Socialist
Labour League to the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, May 8,
1961 – Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 3.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
